Auður Ólafsdóttir - The Greenhouse

— Put your belt on, I say, pointing at the seat belt and illustrating my simple sentence with an appropriate gesture. She looks at me with a reluctant air, but then breaks into a beaming smile, puts her leg down, and clicks on the seat belt. Now that I get a chance to take a better look at the girl I can see she really looks like a budding movie star.

— Just as you desire.

Just as you desire. I mull that line over in my head, wondering if there might be any hidden meaning in that “just as you desire.” Wondering if I can also apply that “just as you desire” to other things and what things those might be. And if I did apply it to other things would she then accept my desire? When I’m back on the pilgrim’s road I, nonetheless, take my right hand off the steering wheel to shake her hand and formally introduce myself.

— Arnljótur Thórir.

She smiles at me.

This dainty actress’s handshake is tight and firm. Before I manage to reach any conclusion, I wonder, as I shake her hand, whether I’m likely to sleep with her at any point over the next two hundred and thirteen miles.

I haven’t been driving for long along the highway when she bends over and pulls a red box out of her drama student bag, not unlike a kid’s school lunchbox. She opens it, takes out a sandwich, wraps it in a white napkin, and hands it to me. Then she takes out another one for herself, also wraps a napkin around it, and sinks back into her seat. Looking into the sandwich in my hand, I see it contains slices of meat, and this less than half an hour after I finished my three-course breakfast, and half a day since I completed the biggest meal I’ve ever eaten.

Then my twig-skinny co-passenger pulls a pile of papers out of her bag, tucks her legs under her on the front seat, and I see her memorizing a script. She’s silent for the first fifteen miles as she learns her part.

It’s not that having another person sitting in the passenger seat beside me bothers me in itself, so long as she remains silent and just reads her words, and sits reasonably still. In any case, it’s clear that I’m going to be sitting beside this actress for the next six hours. I peep at her; right above her long, thick eyelashes there is a very fine black streak of eyeliner. In fact, she reminds me of a familiar and very famous film star that I saw in a movie once.

After a while, the actress rolls up the script, points it at me, and kicks off the conversation by asking me where I’m from.

So I tell her.

— Are you really? she exclaims, shifting position on the seat by placing her right foot on the floor, dragging her left leg under her, and slipping the seat belt under her armpit so that she can face me better as she continues the conversation.

— What’s it like there?

— There isn’t an awful lot to say about the place; there aren’t many things you can grow there.

I’m not sure I have much to add to that. She only speaks her language, which I’ve actually studied at school, although I’ve never had to express myself in long sentences with an actual native before.

— Tell me something about it.

— Moss.

— Cute.

As soon as I spurt out the word moss , I know I’ve gotten myself into a jam. Moss is such a nonstarter and impossible to develop into a topic for discussion. At most, I could list off the different types of moss, but that’s not much of a conversation.

— What’s moss?

If I only had the vocabulary, I would want to tell this budding movie star that moss is a lichen, and time-consuming to walk over. It’s all right for the first ten steps, but if you’re going to cross a vast, moss-carpeted lava field, it’s like walking across a trampoline all day; it can be really tiring on your hamstrings to be sinking into moss for four hours in a row. It can take more out of you than climbing a high mountain. If you rip up moss, you leave a scar in the earth and soil dust gets blown into your eyes. I’d really like to be able to tell her something unusual that no one has ever told her before, but my limited grasp of the language cramps my style. If I were to mention the different shades of moss and the smell it gives off after a shower of rain, I’d be entering the domain of feelings, like a man on the point of proposing to her. I therefore give nothing away to her and say no more than I can grammatically handle:

— A plant that’s like a trampoline.

— Weird, she says. She doesn’t give in — Tell me more.

— Tussocks.

I’m surprised at how well I’m doing at finding words, at my ability to express myself in an alien language, but at least I’m myself when I talk about plants.

— What’s a tussock?

It’s not easy to explain how a tussock is formed, to express the repeated temperature changes of the earth and how they alternate between frost and thaw. I have to think of every single word I’m saying; nothing comes automatically.

— It’s difficult to put up a tent on tussocks.

Then I switch topics.

— Swamps.

On the point of swamps, Mom told me more than once the story of one of Granddad’s favorite horses, which sank under him in a swamp and then popped up again as a skeleton several springs later. I’ve seen photographs of Granddad on that horse, and although I’m no expert, that favorite horse of his looks pretty much like all his other horses to me, with rather short legs, even when you take into consideration the fact that my granddad and namesake, Arnljótur Thórir, was a tall man.

After swamps, I rattle off the names of other types of vegetation without any further explanations, which the actress seems to accept. The Latin names of the plants help me through the most difficult parts of the conversation, and she nods, so I manage to give her an overview of the main features of the local vegetation. I’m on home ground now, with the situation well in hand, and I realize that I’ve tapped conversation material for the next thirty to forty miles: a revision of the Latin names of plants. I mention the clusters of yellow grass, blueberry heaths, and moss campion.

— Then there’s geraniums, meadowsweet, mountain avens, sheep sorrel, prickly rose, burnet rose, and lady’s mantle, I say.

— Hang on, lady’s what? What lady?

I don’t have to go into the botany in any depth, but just rattle off the different species of plants that spring to mind, which is more than enough for my traveling companion to ponder on, as I give her the full lowdown on my roots.

— Angelica, I say. It can reach human height.

— Can it really? she says.

— The grass.

— Grass?

— Yeah, the grass is green all summer, shimmering green, incredibly green.

I stroll across the moor in my mind and through the lush grass until I finally find it, a cluster of lady’s mantle. I glance at the clock and see that it’s taken me about a quarter of an hour to present the vegetation. My limited knowledge of the grammar soon leads me down a blind alley, preventing me from developing my ideas any further. I end my overview on dwarf fireweed.

— Pink dwarf weed grows on black-sand beaches, in isolated spots here and there.

I think it’s important that a person who is brought up in the middle of a forest should understand this, that a flower can grow in isolation, all on its own out of black sand and sometimes in a canyon, too. The moment I mention dwarf fireweed I find myself getting a bit sensitive about it.

— Do you pick flowers there, the fireweed?

— No, it’s put so much effort into growing all by itself, sometimes with only just one or two flowers in a whole stretch of sand.